John Cushnie just likes to be provocative, I am sure. Plastic compost bins are, he said, hopeless. This was in response to a complaint from a woman at our Q&A session (at the Daily Telegraph House & Garden Fair) that the kitchen waste regularly dumped in her bin looked just the same three or four months later as it did the day it went in.

This unequivocal statement was like a red rag to a bull and I took John to task for being so negative. With a little careful management plastic bins, with which many people are taking their first hesitant composting steps, certainly can produce good stuff.

So it is with our public scrap ringing in my ears that I thought I would devote several column inches this week to hints and tips on How to Get the Best out of Your Bin. Those of you with a row of gorgeous wooden compost hoppers the size of beach huts should perhaps go and amuse yourselves elsewhere.

Every household has stuff they should compost but if you have only a tiny lawn, no hedges and generally only small amounts of kitchen waste, old cut flowers and paper to compost, get a wormery and a paper shredder instead and send your excess garden waste off to the council dump.

Worms are the great unsung heroes of the compost world. In return for your meagre offerings they'll repay you with sludgy compost for mulching the odd shrub and pints of liquid plant food.

If you have a plastic bin, buy another one if you can, so that the first has time to mature. Stand them where the sun gets at them (heat is important) on soil, not paving. Place bins on thick metal mesh or weed-smothering membrane to stop intrusion by rodents and tree roots respectively.

Never put meat-based kitchen waste in them. If you stir your bins regularly (see below) most of the contents will be usable at the same time. Forget accessing it through those silly little doors at the bottom: just lift the bin right off the compost, remove the 95 per cent that is ready, put the bin back over the rest and start again - a messy Sunday morning job once every few months.

The pile always sinks dramatically in the final stages, so you should expect only to get half a binful of mature compost at a time. If necessary, it can be stored under cover in bags or lidded dustbins until needed.

Many bins "fail" because they are either too dry or too wet - what compost aficionados mean when they bang on about the carbon/nitrogen balance. Basically, for every thick layer of anything wet or green that goes in to the bin you should add an equivalent amount of something dry and dead.

This can be straw or shredded cardboard, but shredded paper is the most readily available and it is startling how much your bin will absorb. Paper shredders are not expensive and can often be found on special offer. If the bin becomes too dry (a rarity in my experience) water it, or - as so many gardening media-types delight in telling you - pee in it.

Plastic bins will absorb an enormous amount of woody prunings if they are shredded, thereby reducing their bulk by about 80 per cent. For those with shrubs, trees or hedges, a garden shredder is a useful investment and can be shared between several households.

Once regarded as unsociably clattery, the "quiet" ones are quite different animals (I have an electric Bosch AXT 2200 HP workhorse which has been chewing up my prunings without deafening anyone for the past seven years). Woody prunings take longer to rot down and the resulting compost is coarser, so it is great for mulching but no good for potting.

It pays to remember that insect and animal life is all part and parcel of the rotting-down process. Hordes of woodlice and ants are just doing their thing, as are slugs and snails - although you can (if you are not organic with a capital "O") water the heap with liquid SlugClear to sort them out. Clouds of tiny flies indicate the heap is too wet, so do more stirring, have an extra go with the paper shredder and keep the lid off for a day or two.

And finally, and most importantly, absolutely everyone with a plastic bin needs a compost aerator/stirrer with which to mix the contents on a regular basis (probably once a week) or whenever there is any major addition to the bin. This halves the rotting time and irons out most of the potential problems. It is really hard to stir efficiently with an ordinary garden fork because the top openings of bins are so high and narrow.

I have written about special gadgets at some length before and have had enthusiastic feedback from readers who have acquired them. I have now found a super-efficient compost-turner made by Darlac, which has a double-sided handle and a large pair of blades (01753 547790; www.darlac.com).

Mallow misery

Hollyhocks and lavatera belong to the same rather disease-prone mallow family. I have had two questions recently about them.

David Cook has a problem with a three-year-old Lavatera rosea that has gone downhill rapidly this year. The leaves are curling and drying and the branches are dying off one by one. He has cut some branches out, but soon there will be little left worth keeping. He asks what is wrong and what he can do to save the plant.

This is about par for the course with lavatera. They seem to be the answer to every gardener's prayer: a quick-growing shrub that adds an air of soft maturity to the most raw-looking garden. But three years is about it. After that they start collapsing in the manner David describes, attacked by fungal disease and rocking on their rotting roots. Once this happens they should be binned. In my view, they are a bit of a let-down in the long run.

TWW Jones from Cumbria, growing hollyhocks for the first time, got on quite well until the leaves became overwhelmed by rust, presaged by orange pustules appearing on the undersides of the leaves. He asks if there is any cure and are there any resistant varieties?

You can just about control the disease (I have, and my towering, flowering eight-footers bear witness to the fact), but it takes a bit of effort. You have to remove completely the first flush of leaves in spring, which will invariably show signs of rust. The next lot should be sprayed every three weeks with Systhane Fungus Fighter and the lowest leaves on the stems should be removed as the plant grows up, which seems to stop rust spores from splashing up from the soil.

They end up looking rather gaunt at the bottom, but I grow them behind other stuff so it does not show. Bin old plants and start again every two or three years. The biennial yellow Alcea ficifolia is one of the more resistant types. But I think it is worth fighting the fight for these marvellous things.

Bits and bobs

Greta Hickmott was much taken with a path made of slatted green plastic that had been sunk into a rather boggy walkway to reinforce the grass in a garden she visited. She asks where she can buy one.

The Roll Out Path (£21.99) comes from Two Wests & Elliott (0870 444 8274; www.twowests.co.uk). It is recommended for use as a temporary barrow path that you can put away when not in use. This wet summer it would have been a boon for many gardeners with hard-pressed lawns.

Where can you get Plant Klips, clothes-peg style clips that are so useful for attaching sweet peas and stems of rampant climbers to their supports, asks James Harefield.

I understand that Bettaware, the door-to-door household goods retailer, will supply them "while stocks last". They can also be bought from Phoenix Labelling.

As a special Thorny Problems deal you can get 10 Plant Klips for £3, which includes postage and packing (normally the minimum charge would be prohibitive); call 01206 865444 or email phoenix labelling@hotmail.co.uk, quoting "TP".